The road to 5G is paved in bandwidth and loads of it, Celcom is the first to show-off its 5G deployment strategy when it oragnised the first live cluster field trial at its headquarters. Using existing spectrums mainly the 2.8 and the 3.5 C band, the operator was able to demonstrate speed of up to 1.2Gpbs on the device.

Surrounding areas will also benefit from the trials such as Seksyen 14, Crystal Crown Hotel, MBPJ Tower and Taman Jaya LRT are all subjected for the trial which has shown user throughputs close to 6Gbps and latency of just 10milisecond. The identified macro sites covers approximately 1.22 square kilometre wide, reaching 450 households, 130 shops, offices, shopping areas, outdoor spaces with an estimated population coverage of 4,600 within the vicinity.

During the showcase, Celcom trialed the 5G on real user case scenarios of VoLTE calls over 5G to 4G devices, surveillance system entirely set up on 5G and 4K home streaming. Live stream high resolution gaming was exceptional opening up potential for a new segment in the industry. The tests do give a glimpse into the near future how homes will be transformed and the term smart home becoming ubiquitous. However, to fully realise 5G experience the industry is still waiting for MCMC to announce dates for the 700Mhz spectrum allocation, which we hear will be sometime mid next year.

Both MCMC Chairman Al-Ishal Ishak and Celcom CEO, Idham Nawawi were on deck for the field test marking a historic milestone for the telco. The hub will play a crucial role to ensure smooth roll out for the service and allow network experts, partners to test and familiarise with 5G user experience, use case, network configurations, customer lifecycles management, network optimisation and commercialisation.